


Roads

by renquise



Category: JoJo no Kimyouna Bouken | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2017-11-16 02:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was only a half-bottle of wine, a vintage with more relation to vinegar than anything else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Roads

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the Sugar Mountain arc.

It was only a half-bottle of wine, a vintage with more relation to vinegar than anything else. 

“Terrible shit, isn’t it,” Johnny remarked beside him, pouring him another measure from the bottle.

“Yep,” Gyro said. The tingling warmth spread to the tips of Gyro’s cold fingers when he drank, though, and he held out his tin cup to Johnny for another cupful. “The whole not-being-dead thing gives it a certain je-ne-sais-quoi, though. Apart from that, you might have gotten stiffed.”

Johnny buried his face in his hand. “Oh my god, was that a pun,” he said, a slow half-smile muffled by his palm.

“Corpse? Stiffed? Come on, that was pretty good,” Gyro said, nudging him.

“I’ll take it,” Johnny said, after a moment of consideration and another swig of wine.

They sat awhile longer, until the flakes grew thick and Gyro could feel the damp snow melting into his jeans. “Come on, let’s finish this inside, at least.”

They gathered their horses and tracked down Johnny’s wheelchair, and then acquired another bottle of similarly dubious vintage at the hotel bar, carefully avoiding questions about the casino.

The second bottle ran out pretty quickly, but the bar also had whiskey, which did a pretty good job of compensating. Johnny was quiet, and Gyro appointed himself to pouring both of them whiskey when he looked like he might be slipping into a funk. Keeping up team morale, and all that. 

Gyro set his last shot down on the bar, and Johnny slowly slumped against his shoulder, warm and loose-limbed. 

“Hey,” Johnny said.

“Hey,” Gyro said in return, proving that Zeppelis were still capable of stunning verbal repartee, even when pretty sloshed.

“Sorry I almost got you eaten by a tree,” Johnny said.

“All part of the game. Race. Thing. Sorry about the corpse parts,” Gyro said in return.

“We’ll get them back,” Johnny said. He tensed suddenly. “Shit, we still have the rooms we got for tonight, don’t we? Do we just have to sleep in them to use them up properly?”

“Depends on your definition of ‘using a room,’ I guess,” Gyro said. He couldn’t feel the sinewy branches of wood creeping inside his veins to join him (more permanently) to the mahogany bar, so they were probably safe, whatever they did.

Johnny grimaced. “What, do you mean we should pick up a few girls at the nearest possible opportunity?”

Gyro shrugged. “Probably not necessary, but hey, I’m not stopping you.”

Johnny waved him off. “Can’t be bothered,” he said. “We’d probably run into those girls from earlier and have another embarrassing conversation.”

“I’ll have you know that for someone whose feet were suddenly being joined to the floor, I was smooth as—as fucking butter,” Gyro protested. He totally had better game than that, usually.

“Yeah, yeah, I could see you ready to pull out a joke,” Johnny snickered and waved at him to lean over, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, help me get upstairs before you go out and try your smooth moves.”

“Maybe I will!” Gyro said. He was pretty sure he was too tipsy to get any kind of affronted, even if his jokes were awesome.

Johnny wasn’t that light—for all that he was shorter than Gyro, his shoulders were broad and his arms muscled, their curves defined when Johnny tightened his arm around Gyro’s shoulders: biceps brachii leading to deltoid and then to trapezius, neat and defined as the diagrams and dissections that Gyro had studied under his father.

“You’re kind of heavy,” Gyro said out loud, slipping an arm under Johnny’s legs and hefting him up.

“You’ve already offered a lift,” Johnny said, “No take-backs. Forth, noble steed. Are you going to have trouble with the stairs?”

“Who do you think I am,” Gyro said, striding manfully and purposefully towards aforementioned stair challenge.

They made it up the stairs with only a (totally intentional) stagger that earned Gyro a punch on the arm. 

“Ow,” he said genially. 

Johnny winced. “Sorry, was that where you got shot?”

Gyro shrugged. “Maybe? Everything seems to be healed up fine. Upsides of being swallowed by weird magic trees, huh?”

“If you say so,” Johnny said.

“Hey, get the door for me,” Gyro said. “Key’s in my pocket.”

“Of course,” Johnny muttered, reaching down to feel around Gyro’s pocket. “You could put me down, you know. Easier for everyone involved.”

“Nope!” Gyro said, cheerfully. “My balance is precarious enough as it is.”

“Thought you were steady as a rock. You could have told me before we went up the stairs, you know.”

“I wouldn’t drop you,” Gyro said. “Not even with enough bottles of the finest Barolo to fell a bull.” Yes, that sounded about right. “Hey, that would make a really great song. Barolo. Bull. Alliterawhatsit.”

Johnny ducked his head down. “Oh my god, just shift me over so I can get the key. You’ve clearly had way too much if you’re saying things like that ” Johnny said. His fingers fumbled around Gyro’s pocket, and Gyro cocked his hip to the side to help him. Nope, no dropping here. Stable as a fucking rock.

“Just like you didn’t let the tree get me, right?” Gyro continued. 

Johnny’s fingers froze, and then finally closed around the keys. “I—I almost did. Fucking selfish of me.”

Gyro shrugged. “You didn’t, though.” Wasn’t if he had suffered too much from the experience, either—there was just a moment where he could feel the stiff grain of the wood creeping under his skin and pushing against its boundaries, and then he just hadn’t felt anything, not until he tumbled back out of the wall and into the snow.

Johnny didn’t answer, but punched his arm again, lightly. (Almost missing this time, Gyro noticed. He wasn’t the only one with whiskey in his veins.) “Stop moving, I can’t get the key in.” 

It took a few more tries, but they finally got the door open. Nothing fancy, but it had a bed, and that made it a castle, nay, a palace.

Johnny tumbled out of Gyro’s grip onto the bed, landing with a light “oof” and bouncing on the mattress. My god, actual springs and everything. Gyro pulled off his boots and a couple of layers and flopped onto the bed as well to properly test its qualities. It was, effectively, very nice. He closed his eyes, wiggling into the covers. Gyro was pretty good at falling asleep anywhere, but having an actual bed was a most appreciated novelty.

Johnny’s hand mushed onto his face. “Hey. Hey, this is my bed. For once, we have separate rooms and everything, and I don’t need to listen to your snoring.”

Gyro considered that. “I don’t snore.”

“Yes, you do. It’s terrible.” Johnny’s hand flopped off his face and onto the bed, his curled fingers bare centimetres away from Gyro’s cheek. His nails were growing back slowly, the tender skin of the nailbed still exposed and the light outlines of stars barely visible beneath the skin, like the tracings of blue veins.

“Mmm.”

“What are you staring at my fingers for? As much as having a bed to myself would be nice, I’m not going to shoot you in the face to get it,” Johnny said, wiggling his fingers in Gyro’s face and almost poking them up Gyro’s nose. 

“Are they sore? After you use your stand, I mean,” Gyro said, catching Johnny’s fingers. He’d never asked, mostly because they usually had more serious wounds to worry about. Gyro was pretty glad that neither of them had gotten an infection so far. 

Johnny shrugged. “Not that sore. Just sensitive, I guess?”

“Right.”

Johnny’s hand flexed in his grip, but didn’t pull away. 

Gyro probably shouldn’t be thinking about putting Johnny’s fingers inside his mouth. At least not without prior warning, because, ow, that could end badly, but as a general principle, too. 

On the other hand, it could be pretty hilarious.

Let it never be said that Zeppelis didn’t make rational, well-reasoned decisions.

Johnny’s fingers tasted like whiskey, probably spilt over from one of the last overfull shots. Johnny looked at him, eyes wide, and opened his mouth to say something, only to close it again. Gyro felt the mattress shift, Johnny’s hips jerking against his leg.

“Uh, ” Johnny said eloquently, his face red. The pad of Johnny’s index caught against Gyro’s lip when Johnny slowly drew his hand back. “Care to explain?”

Gyro thought that one over. “Nope. Seemed like a good idea.”

“Fuck,” Johnny said, kind of wonderingly. One of his hands fastened in the front of Gyro’s shirt, and the other settled tentatively below Gyro’s jaw, the line of Johnny’s spit-slick fingers cold against Gyro’s skin. 

Johnny was lithe and determined and fierce, and Gyro would not mind kissing him right now, but Johnny got there before he did, eyes squeezed shut and lips pressed tight against Gyro’s. 

Johnny kissed very deliberately, like someone trying very hard not to give away that they were drunk, until some part of him seemed to say “ah, fuck it” and he relaxed all at once, all warm skin and sloppy kisses. Gyro was a pretty big fan of kissing, in general, and this was more than a-okay in his book.

Gyro settled his hands easily in the small of Johnny’s back, the tips of his fingers skimming the swell of Johnny’s ass. For a day that had gone from awesome (treasure, good food, corpses) to god-awful (killer trees, assassins, corpses), it was pretty quickly swinging back to awesome again.

The tips of Johnny’s fingers on his neck were slowly warming up, and the line of his body was hot and supple as he shifted closer, letting go of Gyro’s shirt and flattening his hand over Gyro’s chest. Gyro hummed into the kiss as Johnny’s lips pressed against his, almost chaste, but not. He slid his mouth down, the tendons in Johnny’s neck shifting when Johnny tilted his head to the side to let Gyro suck at the pulse in his skin over his carotid, before Johnny tugged his mouth back up to catch another kiss, hard and breathless.

He felt Johnny’s body tense up, and then Johnny pulled away, panting, and scrubbed a hand across his mouth. “Okay. Okay, this is a bad idea,” he said, his voice gone low and gravelly. He still had his hand on Gyro’s neck, and his hand slid down to Gyro’s shoulder, as if to push away, though he didn’t follow through.

“Doesn’t need to mean anything,” Gyro offered. He liked this, liked the easy companionship of a warm body, liked Johnny, liked being alive, so it was all coming up aces in his book. Gyro wasn’t terribly good at cards, but he knew a good hand when he saw one.

“Yeah, I know,” Johnny said, not meeting Gyro’s eyes. “Just—not now, okay?” Johnny had the look of someone in a store with something very delicate and expensive in his hands, afraid of dropping it and having it shatter all over the floor, which was usually Gyro’s cue to be the proverbial bull in the china shop. But now wasn’t the time, perhaps.

The wind outside rattled the windows and whistled through a crack. The window was a smear of white and grey, the storm worsening. They had picked their night for a hotel pretty well—if the storm died off, they’d be able to get an early start, unlike most of their dear fellow competitors stuck out there, ho ho.

“We’ll make good time tomorrow, I think,” Gyro said, after a moment.

“Yeah?” Johnny said. His hand still rested on Gyro’s chest.

“Yep. Horses’ll be well-rested, and it should be a clear ride all the way to the strait.”

“Good,” Johnny said, the familiar flare of determination lending steel to his voice. “Fuck, it’s cold.” Johnny leaned down to shift his legs off the covers and pull the thick quilt up over both of them, goosedown settling around their shoulders. 

Gyro slung an arm over Johnny’s chest and pushed his face into Johnny’s shoulder, where the muscles merged into the firm column of Johnny’s neck, the smell of carbolic soap faded under clean sweat. (Johnny had been pretty excited about the prospect of actually having a warm bath for the first time in fucking ages.) Johnny tensed, and then relaxed as he squeezed lightly.

“Hey, get your own teddy bear,” Johnny said, not really protesting. He wiggled further into the covers, pulling them up around their ears to mitigate the draft.

“She’s in my saddlebag, and it’s in the other room,” Gyro said, closing his eyes. “Too lazy to go and get it.”

“Fine, then,” Johnny said. “God, I’m going to regret this when I wake up with your dried drool down my back.”

“Lies and slander,” Gyro said, and yawned. 

Johnny’s arm settled around his back, and sleep came easy.

 

The snow the next morning was crisp under their hooves, blinding white as far as they could see. The road ahead was clear and smooth as the Virgin’s own veil, and they rode.


End file.
